Kennesaw State University

Author Archives: Leonard Witt

WNYC CEO: Difficulty of Public Funding of Journalism Gets Underestimated

Will public funding, the public radio model be the savior for high quality, ethically sound journalism? Laura Walker, President and Chief Executive Officer of WNYC Public Radio, says, “I don’t think it is an easy model, I think it’s actually harder, and I think it gets underestimated.” To learn more, watch the Leonard Witt video [...]

New Haven’s Paul Bass Tells of Flowering of Independent News Websites

Today Paul Bass’s New Haven Independent is featured in a New York Times article about journalism change. Leonard Witt did the following video interview recently with Bass for his Future of Journalism of series. Bass says, “The future of journalism I think is the flowering of independent news websites as well as the morphing of [...]

Researcher: Reading News at Work Lowers Inclination to Pay

There was a time when folks leisurely read their news over breakfast. Alas, Northwestern University researcher Pablo Boczkowski has found that now people are reading most of their news on the internet at work. Their new reading habits are such that, according to Boczkowski, it is unlikely that they will pay for the news. Boczkowski [...]

Robert Picard Optimistic About Journalism, Not News Bureaucracies

As part of Leonard Witt’s video series on the Future of Journalism he spoke with Robert Picard, a well respected media economist; when Witt asked him the big question about the Future of Journalism, Picard responded:
I’m very optimistic about the future of news and journalism. I’m not as optimistic about large bureaucratized organizations that have [...]

Survey: Potential Tablet App Developers Think Business Apps Over Games

Of course, everyone is all atwitter about the soon to be released new Apple tablet and that excitement apparently includes app developers. Jeff Haynie and his folks at Appcelerator did a survey of about 500 of its 18,000 developers. According to the survey, the developers anticipate building tablet apps in this order: Business/Productivity, Entertainment, Social [...]

McChesney, Nichols Advocate Government Help to Save Journalism

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols discuss their new book The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again with NOW’s David Brancaccio “about the perils of a shrinking news media landscape, and their bold proposal to save journalism with government subsidies.”
They discuss the idea of providing [...]

Rosenstiel, A Journalism Optimist — But It May Be a Long Wait

Yesterday, after using the Baltimore media ecosystem as a case study, the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) issued a rather gloomy report on the state of local news. A few weeks ago, I asked Tom Rosenstiel, director of PEJ, if he was an optimist or pessimist about the state of the journalism. [...]

Social Media Earthquake Advice

Earlier today the San Francisco area had a 4.1 magnitude earthquake. Right in the midst of the early Tweeting I saw his Tweet from Ryan Kuder, who lives in San Jose:
In the event of an earthquake, take the following measures: 1) Tweet about it. 2) Take cover under a desk.
Pretty amusing.
Just before that [...]

SoCon10, January 29-30; Register Now, Don’t Get Shut Out

Each year about this time I tell people to register now for the our SoCon social media, social networking conference at Kennesaw State University because to wait is to risk getting shut out. And, of course, then when it is too late — we only have 300 seats — I start getting the calls. So [...]

Geek Squad Founder: Journalism Start-Ups Must Think Mobile First

Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens says anyone contemplating a journalism start-up should think of getting a mobile presence first and then think of a computer application that plays off the app, not the other way around. Indeed, if he were starting the Geek Squad today, it would not be providing support for computers, it would [...]